Margaret Aldritch: A life in memorials in the Lumley Chapel

By Andrew Skelton - Key-holder & supporter of The Lumley Chapel (St Dunstans), Cheam. Written November 2021.

There must be plenty of family stories woven throughout the memorials in The Lumley Chapel at Cheam, but few can be as far involved as that identified recently through research into the life of Margaret Aldritch, which spanned much of the 17th century. Her simple gravestone, eroded over three centuries by the passage of feet, has been totally ignored by visitors, but has now been linked to others memorialised in the chapel.

Margaret was born in about 1613, the eldest daughter of Ellen or Helen Gittens, nee Rogers, whose family had been resident in Cheam, Sutton and Beddington for some years. Margaret is first mentioned in the will of her grandmother Margaret Huntley (formerly Rogers) in 1636, where she receives a gift of money and is forgiven her debts.

The next period of Margaret's life is somewhat shrouded in mystery and perhaps controversy; her only son (and probably only child) Francis Rogers, who is named as her son in various documents, is born in 1641 but there is no mention of his father. However, Margaret’s uncle, Francis Rogers the elder, is named as such in the parish registers at his baptism, and ‘having noe child and bearing and alwayes expressing a great affection to . . the only sonne of the said Margaret Rogers’ (as we are told in a contemporary court case), he would leave the young Francis all his sizeable estate on his death in 1660.

One of his Cheam properties was a ‘capital messuage’ - ie, a large substantial house – occupied by the Jacobite-leaning curate George Aldritch, founder of Cheam School and its first School-master; it seems likely that this was the home of the fledgling school until 1719.

In 1661 a former Cheam resident, Thomas Pierson, appointed Margaret Rogers (as she was known) as the guardian of his underage children on his death; making her responsible for their education. He also gave her the right to withhold their inheritance if they marry without her consent. Margaret was therefore in a position of some authority, marking her out in what was a society largely dominated by men. The following year Margaret married George Aldritch, cementing her connections to education. In 1685 Margaret lost both her husband (regrettably his monument has disappeared) and son Francis the younger, who died childless in 1688 - his memorial in the chapel (below left) tells us that he ’enjoyed a great life from which he learnt much from his parents’ and his death ‘caused dry eyes to flow’.

One of last wishes of Francis the younger, which his mother promised to execute, was to institute a charity to benefit the poor of Cheam, the annual payment from which was to be drawn from the rent of a house in Cheam. Margaret was to double the payment on her own death. Miraculously most of this house (above right), dated to the beginning of the 16th century, survives and is still a notable feature of Cheam’s main shopping area today.

Margaret’s recently widowed, wealthy daughter-in-law Ann was in her early forties, but she finds a suitable husband amongst her mother-in-law’s connections – no less than Thomas Pierson’s only son Samuel, aged about thirty, whom Margaret had been responsible for from infancy. Their only child, a daughter Frances - ‘beloved innocence’ - is born in September 1690 but died in May 1693, and is commemorated by a small tablet (below left).

On Samuel’s death in 1719 the last of the sequence of memorials was commissioned; a large baroque tablet on which he, his mother-in-law Mary Elsey and finally Ann, who died in 1728, are commemorated (above right).

There seems little doubt that Margaret was responsible for the wall monuments to her husband and her son, but when she died in 1695 she simply asked for ‘a grave stone be laid over me with my name, age, and whose wife I was, ingraven upon it (and noe more)’. Today, this remarkable woman’s battered grave slab still bears that inscription, recognisable and just legible, despite the passage of time (below).

When you visit the Lumley Chapel, please look for it!

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